Archive reference PP/KCB/ 3/7/1 document 07
June 9th 1965
The Profumo Ward and Keeler Scandal
I think I really must talk to you tonight about the affair that has taken up so much of the news for the last few -weeks and that began with Mr. Profumo's admission of dishonesty to the House of Commons, and his immediate resignation from the House and from his position as Minister of Defence. It is not that I want to say much about Mr. Profumo. He seems only to have been on the fringe of the activity that I want to speak about, a man of distinction, trapped into an appalling scandal by giving -way to a common weakness - the temptation to a loveless sexual adventure.
It may seem strange that I should talk about a sexual scandal to a whole s[chool] - to boys and girls over the whole wide range: from 11 to 18. But there is no reticence in newspapers nowadays; they vie with each other in publishing every scandalous detail, and in plain English of which no one can mistake the meaning. The result is that every school child, however young, hears something of it. Even though he may be of an age when he’s not very, interested, even though he may find the detailed reports too long and too boring to read, nevertheless [the] atmosphere of the whole wretched business penetrates like a bad smell into his [mind]. Without knowing what is happening to him attitudes are forming in his mind. The words, "going to bed", making love, prostitute, immoral earnings: these are beginning to form patterns in: his mind and thus to decide for him how he will think about sexuality and relations between men and women. What you feel at 18 may have been decided largely by what you heard but hardly paid attention when you were very young. So I must say my say, to prevent the bad smell penetrating right into your spirit and beginning to shape your thoughts.
Those of you who are old enough to have paid close attention - what did you think as you saw in the papers, as I saw on the T.V. news, these apparently charming young women going to and from the court where Dr Ward is being tried young, beautifully dressed, clean - and perhaps according to formal standards beautiful? You have heard the word "squalid" used time after time in this affair. We usually associated the word squalid with dirt. But there is no dirt in this. These young women are not bawds or trollops; their clothes and their bodies are probably spotlessly clean, their rooms neat and tidy. There is no evidence that they cone from poor homes or bad districts. Yet the story is a story of corruption and evil, degradation and perversion, of cynical exploitation of human beings and even attempted murder.
You might have thought, mightn’t you, that nice people don't get involved in this kind of thing - nice people from nice homes who wear nice clothes and have nice parents and drive in nice cars? No - this terrible story shows that the seeds, of evil are in all of us - in quite ordinary nice people everywhere. Some of the characters in the story are indeed abnormal, but many of them especially the girls, need never have been involved. They Some tried to refuse to keep out, but because they had no real knowledge of themselves or of what was happening, they were worn down until they too became corrupted.
Any of you here may someday stumble on to the fringe of this kind of life, for it is evidently far more widespread than most people imagined. So you must know yourselves, you must know the weaknesses in yourselves through which you might be trapped; you must know how to direct your lives so that you have real defences.
The older ones among you know that there are many of us in nearly every part of the Christian Church who are working hard to encourage a new attitude to sexual morality. We say that the conventional morality is not good enough; it does not make the true distinction between good and evil. We want a. deeper morality that begins from a real understanding of the purpose of human life, of the wonderful possibilities in personal relationships if they are truly loving and responsible. We say that it isn't signing the marriage register that makes an affair good, though we hope that the moment of marriage will be as meaningful as it possibly can be. No, it is what people give to each other, their understanding of each other and their devotion to each other, each one's concern over everything that may happen to the other person. So I'm not going to concern myself with the fact that this is a story of sexual indulgence between unmarried people however deplorable that aspect of it may be. There have been other stories in history of sexual experience between the unmarried that are of an utterly different character -that of Heloise and Abelard, for instance. That was a relationship of the greatest depth. Its tragedy and its suffering were infinitely greater than anything these people of the moment will go through. Where does the difference begin? When we read the story of Heloise and Abelard we are taken at once beyond the point where any of us has the right to pass judgment; we are indeed with Christ on the Cross. But in this group that circulates round Dr Stephen Ward we find, so it seems, only life lived at its shallowest, without meaning or purpose. It is not tragic, because it doesn't mean enough. It is simply pitiful. And I should say that I talk about these people not to condemn them. If one could see into their hearts of these girls, perhaps one would indeed be moved simply by pity.
Briefly these are the charges brought up in court. We must not say that they are true, because the matter is sub judice. Dr Ward is charged mainly with living on the earnings of girls who slept with men for money and with having arranged for illegal operations to be carried out in two instances of girls who became pregnant as a result. He had intercourse with Christine Keeler. That is not a crime; but he went much further and got Christine Keeler to persuade other girls to come to his flat so that he could have intercourse with them. He got these girls, so it is said, to offer themselves to other men for money and to pay him part of the proceeds. It looks as if some of the girls came readily enough, but that some were shocked to begin with, tried to resist Dr Ward's persuasion but eventually gave in. Keeler, when asked how she was persuaded to procure all these other girls for Dr Ward, said that she was under his influence, had no will of her own when she was with him - and that she did it all because she admired him. It seems that in this, crowd of people there was no thought of real love or caring for each other; people plunged into the deepest intimacies of sexual contact almost as soon as they met each other, just as animals copulate, as a male and female rabbit do when one is introduced into the cage of the other.
Let's look at it from the girls' point of view. What does a girl need from a man in the most intimate friendship she can imagine? Ask yourselves, each of you. She wants to be able to reveal all of herself in complete trust, not just her body but her most intimate thoughts, hopes, fears. He must be a person who will be interested in her, with whom she can share her interests. He must be able to stand by her when she needs him to. She also wants him to be the kind of person to whom she can give all that she is fitted to give whose real needs she can get to know - not just giving her body, but the generosity of her mind and spirit, and her everyday thoughts from minute to minute. He must need her - in much more than, a bodily sense. I think it's true to say that a girl doesn't urgently want sexual intercourse, not to begin with. She wants the whole pattern of things in the friendship. But men do tend to think specially of sexual intercourse, sometimes to the exclusion of all else.
Now what goes wrong, that a girl instead of this should became involved in an affair that lasts any a few hours, to which she can give nothing but her body - an affair -with a man whom she does not know and who does not want to know her in more than a trivial sense? First - sheer excitement. All a girl's capacity to think can be blotted out simply by excitement. This can happen in a man too, but it is more devastating in women, more complete. And there's a certain weakness in girls and women that goes with this excitement and makes the results often tragic. I'm going to illustrate it dramatically. Here before me are four glasses of different shapes. Here is some water. I pour the water into the glasses, and in each glass the water takes the shape of the glass; it has no shape of its own. I'm not the first one to make the point this way. The woman is the water, the man is the glass, and the woman takes whatever shape the man demands of her.
A woman has a strong impulse to adjust herself to the man she is attracted to, sometimes an overwhelming impulse that overrides every other consideration. This can happen in the most serious things of life. I know of a girl who fell in love with a Catholic man. She at once began to take instruction and as soon as possible entered the Church. But then the man dropped her. The next man she fell in love with was a Methodist; so she stopped being a Catholic and became a Methodist. After that I lost track of her. This is not just a joke; it is rather terrible. Religion is a serious matter - for the deepest personal judgment; to switch around like this is to surrender personal judgment. But it doesn't in this instance endanger a girl's soul and life necessarily.
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A girl with reasonably decent standards but perhaps not much strength of character meets a man who knows how to be charming. She begins, to admire him, to be flattered by his attentions; soon she wants terribly to be approved of by him, she wants to be the sort of girl he likes. She adapts herself to his little wishes, trying to anticipate them. Then the big wish comes; she doesn't necessarily want to make love, perhaps has hardly thought about it; but she can't bear to be anything but the kind of girl he likes, so she gives in. If later he wishes to make use of her unscrupulously - as Dr Ward is charged with doing - she now hasn't the strength to resist; she will do anything to please him.
What is our conclusion? Obviously that a girl must establish herself as a real independent person; she must know this weakness, not pretend that
it doesn't exist in her. She must guard against being let down suddenly by it. She must tell herself insistently that the only friendship that is ultimately worth while is a friendship between equals. That means no giving in, for any reason whatever.
Let me go back to the water. Water isn't just a substance that adjusts itself to the shape it is poured into. It is the most important substance in the world. Living matter is impossible without it. In myths and legends it is the symbol of Life itself. Did not Jesus speak of the well of Living Water? A woman or a girl has this quality also. She is the giver of life, and not only in childbirth. This desire to adjust herself can become something much bigger and nobler - a generosity of spirit that humanity cannot do without. When once a woman has taken on a responsibility, even though it may prove disillusioning - a wastrel of a husband for instance - she will show astonishing faithfulness, endurance and love. That too is adjustment - but of a very different kind. Some of the toughest and most loving work in the world is done by women. Now I ask the girls: which kind of adjustment is to be yours?
In times past respectable girls waited at home for their future husbands to seek them out, or they were introduced to suitable men well chaperoned. Now girls want to be independent as soon as possible. They want to go to London and have a flat of their own — oh, well before they are the age twenty. It is not unreasonable that a girl should want to live independently of her parents or that she should have a flat that she can make her own. But all the same these London flats open the way to these sexual evils. The report: suggest that all the affairs of the Ward group took place in cosy little flats and girls were involved by the age of seventeen.
The girls who seek this kind of independence are eager for what they call Life. Parties, cocktails, lots, of men coming and going, rides in cars, meals in restaurants, laughter, gaiety and lots of clothes. Life - what a word to use; and when you think of where it ends, this search for life is pathetic and pitiful. Remember the story I read you - the ancient myth of Narcissus. Although the story seems to have been about a boy it tells us a great deal about the behaviour of girls - for girls are prone to what is called narcissism; the admiration of themselves, looking into a mirror and becoming obsessed with the image they see there. In spite of what I have said about the too great readiness of girls to adapt themselves to what a man wants, a great deal of what girls call loving is not loving of the other person at all; it is self-love.
Have you ever thought about the way a cat treats a human being? The cat doesn't love you; he likes the feel of himself against your trouser leg. The narcissistic girl is like the cat; loving for her is loving the feel of herself against a man. So more or less any man will do; and she'll make the necessary adaptation to do her pussy-catting. But you know what happened to Narcissus; he pined away and died, because in self-love there is nothing to nourish you, you starve yourself of what you really need, you become empty and shrunken and finally dead. And when they went to bury Narcissus they found no body even that had gone. There was only a little flower. When a girl who has lived the life I have described loses the man of the moment, she may look into her life and find emptiness. One at least in the Ward circle attempted to commit suicide.
There's a very great difference when you really love another person and forget yourself, when you really give, not get. Even if the relationship has to come to an end - because the beloved dies or walks away - by truly loving you have, without knowing it, nourished yourself, you have given yourself strength which will see you through your loss; you will not turn to suicidal thoughts.
When I read through all the details of the case as reported in the papers, the word I used was "dirty", perhaps because in my young days one was trained to think of sex-gone-wrong as necessarily dirty - like -what we call a dirty story. But was it dirty? As I suggested at the beginning of this talk, in the ordinary sense everything may have been very clean. How then shall we think of the way these men and women met and left each other? Isn't it rather like the life of butterflies, living for the brief span of a day, flaunting their bright colours, copulating and dying? Just a meaningless flicker in the sunlight and then all is over; nothing left to mark the place they lived in or to make them worth remembering.
There's a common feature that seems to run through the histories of such girls as those of the Ward set. They are girls with no particular gifts, no abilities, no purpose to give them direction. Most often they take up modeling, as it is called — exhibiting their bodies for artists to paint or using them to exhibit clothes in a mannequin parade. A job that requires no thought, leads to no wisdom or maturity; and a job that ministers more than any other to a girl's narcissism, her self-admiration. Look at me, how beautiful I am.
It is a kind of job that encourages drifting, because it leads nowhere; and waiting - waiting just for something to happen, something exciting to titivate the senses,
What are you going to do with your life? It is time to think and decide now. There are many other snares for young people in our affluent society, the kind of thing we often see when we casually switch on television: innumerable bright young people with television smiles, devoting their energies to mere entertainment, and very poor entertainment at that. The curtain goes up on a brightly patterned stage and three young men come forward. They wobble and gyrate while they sing; they change their positions and change them back again. We've seen it all before, hundreds of times; the same bent knees and swinging bottoms, the flexed arms thrust forward and the snapping of fingers to emphasise a meaningless phrase. The same old tricks and gimmicks, endlessly copied. What a waste of life.
Do you ever think of life as precious? You've only got one life - one brief space of consciousness. Can you bear to waste it in meaninglessness? That parable of the talents - or gold bags as the new Bible puts it - is one of the most significant of all the parables of Jesus, but also one of the most terrifying. Think of the gold bags as life itself. The parable has nothing to do with finance or the investment of money; it's a parable about what you do with the precious gift of life. If you use your life properly it will be creative; it will grow and expand, become richer and richer. But if you do not use your life you will lose it; it will be taken from you. This is yet another of those occasions, like the one when Jesus talked about the sin against the Holy Spirit ("evil be thou my good") when Jesus made it clear that people could take a path that led to utter destruction, could put themselves even beyond God's help. Cast into outer darkness. Christianity is a religion of love, but it is also a religion of truth - it faces the plain facts about life; and one of these facts is that if you do not take responsibility for your life, love cannot rescue you. But if you begin, by ever so small a movement to respond to the challenge of life, a hand is held out to you.
So far, apart from the brief reference to entertainment, I must seem to have been speaking very much to girls — because we started from the girls in this court case. The same general principles apply, of course to the life of both sexes.
And lest you forget the sexual responsibilities of men, let me remind you of what Dr„ Ward is charged with. Even if' the charges are not proved in his particular case, we know that many men are guilty of exploiting women in a completely cynical way. Jesus could be tender and compassionate towards a prostitute who recognised his nature. It was a prostitute who came to him with [the] jar of precious ointment, and she may have been the same woman whom he rescued from the men who tried to stone her to death, the same Mary Magdalene who was the first to meet him after the resurrection and to hear her name called. But could Jesus have been loving towards these men who use women for their passing pleasure, who take a special pleasure in wearing down the resistance of an unwilling woman, and who will exploit a whole group- of women for money? Jesus did not forgive everyone. "You viper's brood how can you escape the damnation of hell?"
Now for a very important last point. I have said that it is girls who have no particular gifts or abilities who tend, to take up these empty occupations. There are many young people who have not any marked creative gifts; we must accept that. They cannot expect to be artists, scientists, writers, ballerinas, or good craftsmen. How can they invest their gold bags - the gift of life? Just this morning we switched on our transistor set by the bedside and heard a woman speaking about a family in Italy, a most unusual family. A man had found an abandoned child. It was in southern Italy, which is still in some ways primitive — indeed shockingly so in such places as Naples and Sicily, where thousands of people live in degradation and filth and there are many, many abandoned children. This man began to collect children round him and to make a home for them. He was a devout Catholic, but he was severely criticised by the Church; such children ought to be in the Church orphanage! But he saw what happened to them in the orphanages; they were not like families and the children were used for the most dismal purposes. Whenever there was a funeral they were employed to make up the formal part of the procession. (I've seen them so used myself in Southern Italy) And the Church said that a man ought not to be in charge of girls. But he persisted, and he got one or two village women to help him. The woman broadcasting was an English woman who had heard of the venture and had gone out to Italy to take permanent responsibility in the little home for these twenty children. I must mention too that the man, though he had no other reason to remain unmarried, took a vow of celibacy - simply because he knew that if he married and had children of his own they would inevitably take a special place in the family and the twenty adopted children would not feel that they belonged in the same way.
This illustrates the way to make use of the gift of life that is open to everyone - a life of service, giving love and care to those who need it. Not the kind of dutiful service that is done by pious, do-gooders, but the kind of service that comes from a loving encounter with people who need love, and that is itself a joy, and never thought of as a duty.
Isn’t it an extraordinary thing that the word "love" has been so debased that it can cover such extraordinarily different experiences, — the so-called love-making that debases and destroys personality and the love that is a self-less meeting of other people's needs? Perhaps we ought to use entirely different words. We can't get rid of the popular and vulgar use of the word love, and so I like to use the word tenderness to describe the other kind. To become tender to another person is to become unusually sensitive to that person's nature and needs, to feel with him and for him (or her) - and it is to forget oneself in the impulse to give everything that one can give.